The RPS Bargain Bucket: That Fits Perfectly

Share this:

I’m in a bit of a hurry this morning, for shortly I’ll be embarking on a geek pilgrimage to Bletchley Park, but not in such a hurry that I can’t compile a list of five of the best deals on PC games this weekend, with a pithy description of why each might be worth your attention. Delve into this week’s bucket, and once you’ve snacked on these deals there’s a never ending banquet you can gorge yourself on over at SavyGamer.co.uk.

Vaguely complicated indie bundle from GamersGate
Only vaguely complicated because you have to pick which games and how many of them you want yourself. There’s four pricing tiers depending on how many games you want to buy, escalating in value as you select more. If you were to ask me which games I think you should consider buying, which I guess you implicitly are by still reading these words, I’d plop for Cell: emergence, Tiny and Big: Grandpa’s Leftovers & AirBuccaneers HD for £2.49/similar price in other currencies. But I guess that’s mostly because I’ve not played many of the other games featured. Have you? Are any of the others the best game in the world? Here’s Nathan opining on 3079 and John on Tiny & Big.

Alice: Madness Returns – £3.74/€12.49!!!/$4.99
Alice: Madness Returns is primarily a game about EA hating the Eurozone and everyone who lives in it. Secondarily it’s about these things that Alec says it’s about:

Early Alice is a carnival of imagination. Arachnid, cyclopean teapots; doll-faced tar-hulks with beefy porcelain arms; winged pig-snouts which reveal secrets when peppered with, well, your giant pepper-grinder cannon; invisible roads and keyhole doors only discovered by shrinking Alice grasshopper-high. It aims to surprise and delight, and surprise and delight it does.

Renegops – £2.49/€3.24/$3.74
Registers on Steam.
Brilliant smashy bashy top down vehicular shoot the baddies game. Here’s what master of all things renegade Brendy C said about Avalanche’s avalanche of destruction:

Renegade Ops may have a bizarre attitude when it comes to ‘challenge’ – it doesn’t have an steep difficulty curve so much as it has an eccentric difficulty curve. But that fits perfectly with its roots. It’s definitely a game that needs to be replayed level upon level in order for you to feel like the care-free, proudly unrefined badass it so clearly wants you to feel like.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution – £4.99/€7.49/$7.49
The DLC and other gubbins are reduced too. I’ve not played The Missing Link yet, but everything else isn’t worth bothering with.
The best Deus Ex game since Deus Ex. I thoroughly enjoyed this for the mashup of Mass Effect and Splinter Cell it was, but I played this less than a year ago and can remember the original game way more intricately than I can this. Take from that what you will. I reckon Eidos will have probably taken on board the reasonable criticism of the basically game breaking boss fights, and player-agency destroying prerendered cutscenes, and Deus Ex 4 will probably be even better. It’s clear, and a shame, that their ambitions were more along the lines of “Make a smart, big, mainstream game” rather than “Make an immersive sim which will change games forever”, but DXHR is still very much a fun time. John wrote down what he thought about DXHR on this very website, specifically on this page.

Deal of the weekArmalyte, Dark Scavenger, Death Ray Manta, Space Giraffe & The Wreckless – Pay What You Want
Space Giraffe. SPACE GIRAFFE. Seriously guys, Space Giraffe. It’s the best game where you can’t really see what’s going on. I recommend not looking directly at it without the use of a pinhole camera, or perhaps just play it by listening to the sounds. Let your mind go and your Space Giraffe will follow. But Minter’s masterpiece isn’t the only thing here, you’ve also got the hot new Fearon joint, DRM. Which is DRM free. DRM is slightly more eighties than the years 1980 to 1989 combined, and contains an unusually high amount of space tiffins. Some bloke called Kieron wrote a thing about Space Giraffe which you can read right here.

56 Comments

some more stuff worth mentioning: Hermitgames’ latest 3 games (qrth-phyl, leave home, fren-ze) for $5 on hermitgames.com. And the GREENLIGHT coupon for Flibble (http://flibblegame.com) maybe still works. Gets you the game for $2.99. It’s quite silly.

If you buy that bundle just for Space Giraffe, you are going to be hugely surprised (pleasantly so!) by Dark Scavenger, which is lovely. Assuming you ever get around to playing it, of course (~13% chance).

Armalyte was utterly amazing back in the day on the Commodore 64.Tempted to buy the pack just for that (already have Space Giraffe and yes it is awesome like all of Yak’s games).
Should be mentioned if you pay more than the average ($4.76 at present) you also get SOL:Exodus which is an Unreal engine powered game in the mould of Freespace (and registers on Steam).

Armalyte is great but the remake runs too fast on my machine, looking as if it’s missing a vsync check or something. It worked fine when I first bought it but then months later after I installed other software it runs too fast. I need to contact the devs about it..

Edit: after trying it on another PC it works fine, which is rather odd. Great game too! :)

It’s $9 on the dev’s site which works out around £5.75 at current currency conversions. Steam is £6.29 at present (£6.99 – 10% launch discount until 21st September).
The dev site uses the Humble Bundle store to process payments so you can either download completely DRM free and/or get a Steam key.

Yeah, this game has stolen my life since I got it.
It’s got that “one more try” addictive quality, and it’s seat-of-your-pants scary at times.
If you don’t like losing, though, this game is not for you, because it will kick your ass over and over again, sometimes in rage-inducing unfair ways.

If anyone is considering purchasing Three Dead Zed in that Gamers Gate indie bundle, don’t. It’s got the worst controls I’ve ever played in a platformer. Any degree of accuracy is impossible when attempting jumps, and considering that half the game consists of jumping, you won’t get very far without a lot of patience and retries. Horrible, fucking horrible.

I already bought it. :( Haven’t played it yet but I’m sorry to hear it sucks. Will still give it a go though. Also bough Project Black Sun, which I already finished. Very good and hard Metroidvania style platformer. Highly recommended!

Anyone knows if the Gabriel Knight games will actually work on a modern PC? I’ve had so much trouble with previous versions…
For anyone who doesn’t know Gabriel Knight but loves adventure games, BUY THEM!

The first Gabriel Knight should be DosBoxed, so there shouldn’t be any problems at all. Don’t know about the rest, but have to agree that they are fantastic adventure games. I love the first part as much as I love Lucasarts’ classics.

Many people consider ToEE to have the best tactical turn-based implementation of DnD combat rules. It always felt the closest to me of an old tabletop dungeon crawl. Whether or not you consider this to be “good” is a matter of your perspective.

The story is about what you’d get from an old DnD PnP module. There’s an elaborate backstory, but it’s essentially a fairly non-linear dungeon crawl with an end boss, side quests, and little in the way of scripted story.

The game was unfinished and extremely buggy on release, but fan patching has addressed many issues and restored a good deal of content. I strongly recommend at least the standard Co8 (Circle of Eight) patch.

It also won’t appear if you’re using NoScript or similar until you allow some random other domain starting with “j”, and then won’t work until you allow the other random domain starting with “j” that that pulls in. (Doing this will reset the form, because it’s important that the web gets worse over time.)

So your data is being processed by a third-party, if you’re a bit paranoid about such things.

It looks like the jotform stuff is primarily form libraries rather than third-party processing. Of course there’s no guarantee that your data won’t be processed by a third-party, but that’s equally true even if no third-party libraries are used.

After jumping through all the hoops, and filling out all the fields, the survey still failed to work, and I believe they did not get my data and I did not get the games.

Since it was the fifth time trying to fill out their stupid form that keeps erasing itself on load, I gave up entirely. After all, I’d already bought the games last year anyway. The questions weren’t terribly useful anyway.

The sale is because they were doing behind the server stuff and purchasing wasn’t an option for 15 minutes, so they have it on sale to make up for it. You can also use the code GMG25-1BW0K-K1A3G to get an additional 25% off, so I ended up getting it for $36